The Ethics of Knowing: Epistemic Virtue at an Ex-literalist Church in Nashville
This dissertation explores the intrinsic connection between knowledge and ethics. It is an ethnography about a community of Christians who have taken it upon themselves to change their way of knowing the Bible in view of becoming better moral subjects. Founded in 1929 as a house church in Nashville, Tennessee, today Heart Ridge Church (HRC) is a predominantly White, suburban middle-class congregation with 1,800 members. They identify as a “Restoration Movement church” (Second Great Awakening, c. 1790-1840) and are affiliated with the Churches of Christ, a conservative branch characterized by its stalwart commitment to biblical literalism. Restorationists lamented the schismatic denominationalism characteristic of American Protestantism, considering such discord a hindrance both to Christians’ own salvation and to global evangelization. They sought to unite all Christians around an “objective method” for acquiring biblical knowledge; there ought to be “no creed but the Bible.” Relying upon the empiricist precepts of Common Sense Realism and Baconian inductive science, they pursued an idealized form of purely perceptual biblical knowledge considered to be free from “interpretive” bias. Biblical truth was to be found, not made, and believers ought to humble themselves before the “facts” of God’s revealed word. HRC maintain an affinity for the Restorationist mission, but they have lost confidence in the efficacy of literalism both to shape good Christians and to make new ones. This puts them at odds with their own epistemic habits and intuitions. In their view, over the generations, literalism lost its righteous humility. This failure, in their view, is evident in their forebearers’ uncompromising dogmatism, suppression of the experiential dimensions of faith, and defense of what HRC now consider parochial social mores. For HRC, literalism ceased to be a moral way of knowing. I examine their efforts to fix this problem. Why does epistemic change matter so much to them? What exactly does renouncing literalism imply in mind, spirit, and practice? What cultural, social, and political conditions are they responding to? This dissertation proposes an anthropology of epistemic virtue. I highlight the ways in which knowing is shaped by ideal types of knowledge to which knowers aspire and the pursuit of which requires a particular shaping of one’s moral subjectivity. I explain how these Christians’ epistemic change is co-constituting with a shift in ethical style. In place of literalism, HRC promotes what members call “narrative theology.” It is a conception of biblical truth substantiated not through the ascertainment of objective facts but through believers’ capacity to foster and to sustain certain intellectual and relational virtues in alignment with the perceived teleology of the canonical biblical narrative. While rationalistic assent to propositional beliefs and the elaboration of logically sound doctrine remain essential, their alternative moral-epistemic strategy exhibits a heightened concern for the ethics of relationships. As aspiring ex-literalists (Chapter 1), HRC members must convince each other to undertake a shift in moral-epistemic stance. They nudge—and at times urge—one another to adopt alternative hermeneutic frameworks for acquiring biblical knowledge (Chapter 2), to critically reimagine the ethics and politics of evangelism (Chapter 3), to cautiously experiment with charismatic spirituality (Chapter 4), and to embrace the explanatory claims of science (Chapter 5). In these ways, these Christians challenge their former knowing selves and cultivate new ones.
American Christianity, Anthropology of Christianity, Anthropology of ethics, Evangelicalism, Fundamentalism, Knowledge, United States, Virtue epistemology
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations